


Bequeath to Us No Earthly Shore

by Nemonus



Series: Dark!Eriana [3]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Destiny 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 02:45:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11221647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Newly-minted Deathsinger Eris Morn escapes Eriana-3's dark below just in time for the Cabal attack on the Tower. With barely a home left to return to, she decides to fight.





	Bequeath to Us No Earthly Shore

**Author's Note:**

> This was finished shortly after E3 2017, so besides being an AU the exact order and locations of Ghaul's attack may be only canon-adjacent once we find out what the canon is. Nevertheless, Ghaul's invasion gave me a good excuse to find a conclusion (?) to this series, as well as indulging in some power fantasy. 
> 
> Title: [Voyages](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/43261)

“What is _happening_ on the Moon?”  
  
“Signal’s garbled.”  
  
“Drown his Ghost and _drink_ the water! We had something.”  
  
“Uh …”  
  
“Sorry. I realize that’s improbable, uh, right now. What was your name again?”  
  
“Jaken.”  
  
“Keep your eyes on this signal, kid. I’m going to talk to Hawthorne.”

* * *

Eris Morn had lost the use of her left leg several days ago. It happened in crossfire, two Cabal enraged or confused and determined to battle it out. The shorter and better armed of the two had lumbered off toward the Last City, aware now on a more visceral level of the indiscriminate way his own army was burning the Earth. Even their own reinforcements from Mars were suspect, according to the greater generals, of being mutineers or simply a backwater militia, useless now because the main force had arrived in such overwhelming splendor. Eris knew this because she was hunting him.  
  
How long had it been? Three years, or six, since she and her fireteam had gone into the pit? The urge to ask a Guardian for help, made moot by the firestorm, warred with Eris’ uncertainty that she could even form the words to ask in a way that would be understood. For so long, she had lived with only the people and creatures who had functioned as other parts of Eriana-3. Words were rarely needed for the sovereign to pass her plans on to her subjects, not when she was the resident Will of the Hive and their energy flowed to her. As one-half of Eriana’s Deathsinger, words made up just a fraction of how Eris spoke to Toland. Their debates and definitions had kept her mind sharp in the unchanging caves, but words were no more or less communicative than the sustained sound of their screaming song.  
  
She had first met him here, in this Last City that now burned. The bracus kept moving, aiming for a hole blasted in a thick wall. She knew he was a bracus because he had occasionally started muttering his own name under his breath.  
  
“Bracus Va’oun will not stand for this. Bracus Va’oun took down that exile with his own cudgel. Bracus Va’oun lead until his team could go no further and then lead more.”  
  
And the like.  
  
As for Eris’ home on the Moon, she felt that it had been lost in several ways already - at least as far as its philosophical underpinnings were concerned. Oryx allowed Eriana’s small outpost, due to some mix of hunger and curiosity. Eriana tithed, and so she was permitted to continue to haunt under the Moon. But then Oryx had been slain, turned into nothingness in his own throneworld, and the Hive on the Earth had become frightened of whatever had been done to the Fallen. The joint vassal-family that was Eriana-Eris-Toland had felt this as a staggering.  
  
For a little while, Eriana had ignored the lack of energy from the Earth. Then it had become frightening to her, an unease that persisted as the numbers of Guardians on the Moon also decreased and the ones who tread there became stronger. There were fewer deaths to send up on the tithe. Eriana grew thin.  
  
Maybe it had been in this thinness, this starvation-beyond-starvation, that Eris had left. Consumed by a nameless guilt and the memory of her old teammates, she left the caves and found a dying Guardian, found a ship.  
  
The Earth’s gravity was not much greater than the Moon’s after the manipulations of the Traveler, but still when Eris had set foot on some isolated plain to the north of the Tower she had collapsed, weak. It was not how she lost the use of her leg, but it had given her information. She could not quite trust her body here.  
  
Eris occasionally heard people move between the ivy-covered buildings in the Last City, but they were like the thralls that ghosted around Eriana’s throne, and so she ignored them. The bracus kept going. Her irritation at him rose, at the inconvenience of the stones on the ground and the smoke darkening the sky.  
  
He had contributed to her ruin, though. He had been the one who had fallen toward the copse where she crouched, who had caught her leg with the side of the metal cudgel. She had already felt weak and unreal then, but she had been able to dart out of sight and watch the rest while the two Cabal had confronted one another. The larger of the two had been part of a mutinous band on Mars, disinterested in rejoining the glorious crusade of the empire that had thrown them at Earth in the first place. Eris was a vulture in their wake.  
  
It was too much to see the City like this and not finally make her decision, though. The Cabal’s back was to her, and soon he would find more of his hulking brood. Eris had hooked her foot around a sturdy stick and taken it as a cane. Poor substitute for a bow made of will, but she could stand. If she had been in the pit the pain wouldn’t have mattered; Eriana and Toland would have made use of it, and it would have faded. Eris had limped this far by pretending that they had.  
  
She began to sing the dirge.  
  
Toland had taught her this, and together they had refined what they knew of the dead Ir Anûk. The Cabal did not immediately respond. Processes in him were slowing down, were preparing for the death his brain now assumed would come much sooner than expected. Bracus Va’oun was aging faster, and he did not notice it as he turned a corner into a green alley lit by a golden shield-wall.  
  
When he slowed enough, Eris slipped the cudgel from his hand.  
  
It was too heavy for her to use properly, made for elephantine Cabal hands out of steel and titanium. She took a leg for a leg with it, though, breaking one just below the knee. The leg crumpled underneath him, trapping the other with it as she had hoped. Va’oun grunted, tucked his head under his massive shoulders, and reached for his gun.  
  
Eris hit the joints of his fingers.  
  
Trying to fight like a Hunter felt deceptively right. Her strikes weren’t landing, power not flowing through even though the movements seemed to match what she remembered. She could no longer trust what she knew about being a Guardian. As deep in the gore of the Hive as she had been, all of its monsters were her siblings. There had been no need to fight. How to pierce Cabal armor?  
  
Instead, she sang. Screamed again, and as Va’oun weakened she felt the energy flow from her and wondered whether Eriana would know where she was.  
  
In the end, he was so slack and uncaring and tired that she shot him with his own gun.  
  
“Bracus Va’oun,” she said, the first croaking words she had used since leaving the caves. “has gotten lost.”  
  
When she raised her head over the pile of armor Eris looked at the crumbling foundations of the Tower.

* * *

Eriana-3 awoke on her throne. She had not moved in several hours; her batteries were in need of recharging, so dangerously in need that she weighed whether it was worth the energy to stand and generate more power through motion at all. She would pace, she thought. As she stood up from the throne, still Warlock-graceful and clad in the remains of her Warlock cloak, she felt her armies flinch.  
  
Something on the Earth was attacking the Guardians, splinter groups ranging out across the Last City. Hive broods on Earth lurked, nervous. And around the Moon there was a fleet.  
  
A flash of jealousy started her pacing. If Oryx had held the Dreadnaught, he could have stopped this. If Oryx had won, the Cabal would right now be finding a foe fat with the Light of their defeated enemies, and this fight would have been different.  
  
Energy boiled from the Hellmouth. Eriana could feel the resolve of Knights and Wizards there, the bloodthirsty inspiration. She had so few tombships here to send out to them. Too few?  
  
No. As she paced, she sent the ships she had that had not been repurposed. Even if they did not set foot on the Moon, the Cabal had brushed the edges of her territory. They demanded an answer.

* * *

Eris pressed onward. At the end of the alley the golden wall was a shield around a Cabal forward line, a shining web of solid energy. Her leg ached, badly enough that she wanted to discard the crutch and sit by the side of the Cabal she had killed. The noise of the encampment on the other side was muffled. A number of Cabal had established a checkpoint at a crossroads, but Eris could not recognize any landmarks in the distorted golden screen. She wasn’t sure whether she would have recognized fragments of the City at all, but better indicators, the ruins of the Tower, were also lost in the intervening buildings and the wartime smoke.  
  
She began to stir the air around her. Cut off from Eriana, her patchwork power was not as strong as it could have been here. A true Deathsinger would not have been tethered in this way, but Eris did not have the power inherently. She could be mistaken for a Wizard, maybe. It was the Will that mattered, and being so close to Eriana she was fed fatter on the sword-logic than the rest of the hordes.  
  
She felt herself rise over the wall, the walking-stick dropping to the ground beside the dead Bracus.  
  
Her power wavered as she again reached for old, familiar strategies. The Light, lost to her for so long that she had become ambivalent to its movements, should have been more present here. The fight had gone very badly for the Guardians. She could not sense the Traveler, but she understood that it might still be there behind the smoke.  
  
The Will of the Hive demanded that the laws of physics dictate that she weighed less than the air. Its forces moved her this way and that, and so she flew.  
  
(Had the power of the Guardians felt as heady as this?)  
  
As she rose, the voices of the Cabal came to her more clearly. They spoke in their own language, gesturing toward the Traveler and toward one another. Eris bared her teeth.  
  
Surely the Vanguard would not have been any more welcoming. Eris had imagined that she might surrender to them, might become a spy if she was not attacked on sight. She would offer information about what she and Eriana and Toland had done, as a confession and as a map of the Moon. She had tracked the Bracus here out of rage, but it was a sort of rage she fell into as one might fall into sleep.  
  
Perhaps that was the difference between her power and the power she had once had as a Hunter. She had exerted herself for the Light, had drawn it up out of herself after long and tiring training. Deathsinging itself was a surrender.  
  
She shook her head, wondering just how lulled she had been since she left the Moon. She left because she no longer wanted to use this power, but here she was, taking it when it was easy.  
  
She had risen to the height of the second-story windows of the abandoned apartments. The light from her green eyes must have alerted the Cabal line, or the whip of power like wind.  
  
The squadron turned to look at her.

* * *

The flagship was fighting back.  
  
Eriana watched it in her mind’s eye. Her awareness of her own troops had increased once the attack started, as if she had all along had powers she would never have discovered in peacetime. She was almost certain that she was as powerful as Crota had been now, perhaps approaching the omniscient control of Oryx. She could sense the remains of the Dreadnaught, its canons sheered off and its central nervous system blackened and dormant.  
  
“Toland,” she said. The former Warlock was slouched by Eriana’s makeshift throne, sleeping or contemplating in the green-black stone room where Crota had once raged. “Can we channel this war-energy?”  
  
Three bright eyes looked over his shoulder at her. “Perhaps you can. The reach of the arm of the Hive is long, but without the Dreadnaught … “  
  
“What about the Deathsong?”  
  
“In what proximity? Bring my enemies to me, Will of Eriana. Then we shall see how they take their poison.”  
  
“We cannot bring them here,” she muttered. The Cabal were largely ignoring the Moon, perhaps rightly reading its human settlements as abandoned. The few tombships she sent had not been tracked, but had also easily been overwhelmed by ships of greater size or greater numbers. The Cabal had no reason to follow a small pest back into its den. “Even if Eris was here, the power would not be magnified enough.”  
  
Toland hunched further, looking away from Eriana.  
  
“Where is she?” Eriana snarled. Toland would not admit his sundering grief, but Eriana would - and would admit how inconvenient it was to find her Deathsinger’s powers halved. As she stood, the Hive across the Moon stood too, screamed and sent screaming blasts of energy toward the too-distant sky. This futile rebellion, Eriana knew, went unnoticed. Eris had snuck away in the night, and Eriana had not missed that she took the pieces of Eriana’s Ghost, although Eriana did not understand what use she might have found for them.  
  
With another shrug of power Eriana felt a fourth tombship destroyed by Cabal fighters. The few the Hive had killed were like trickles of water in a desert; their deaths would need to be conserved to matter.  
  
“Gone away,” Toland muttered. He held his narrow, blackened hands out as if in supplication, or as if expecting Eris or Eriana to reach for him.  
  
Eriana could not stop to think about why Eris had betrayed her. “The betrayal is what matters,” she said.  
  
Toland looked for a moment as if he was going to speak, but her momentum quelled him. She tugged at the tithe, drawing power to her.  


* * *

Eris watched the Cabal watch her. The Tower they had taken burned behind them. The urge to go back rose up in her stronger than before. No matter what the Vanguard would think of her now, she had left Eriana’s service precisely because she missed the people she had known, the people her fireteam members had been, in this city.  
  
But would this revenge be hers, or the Hive’s? The team she looked to for comfort had become the very thing that made her uncomfortable. She could do nothing, could neither kill using Hive magic nor help whatever Guardians remained. Reclamation through inaction - what meaning did that have?  
  
The choice was removed from her because the Cabal started shooting.  
  
Eris wove back and forth in the air, dodging some of the blasts, shielding herself from others with the energy of her own death. When she sang again it was enough to put the weight of the Darkness on them, but not to kill. She left the line of Cabal confused, enough so that they stood at their shield in quiescent stupor. Eris hoped that a Guardian would find them while they were still stunned.  
  
She couldn’t wait for that, though. After the fight was over the choking air seemed more real to her, the attack more dire, the loss more personal. She floated, one leg aching and the other heavy, toward one of the complacent Cabal.  
  
“Where is your commander?” She struggled to push the words past her teeth, but the intent of them flowed out with her magic, and she gestured toward the sky in the south toward which the bulk of the fleet had careened toward the City.  
  
The Cabal groaned.  
  
Eriana had once faced a foe like this.  
  
It took time for the Cabal to give up his secrets, those secrets that would return him or exile him from his homeland if his commanders ever learned of his interrogation. By the end, his mouth was swampy with blood and the answer was filled with details. She needed to know not just that the leader rode a warship - that much was obvious. This faction of Cabal were not subtle people.  
  
By the end, he told her the name and the fleet pattern which it followed. He would have told her who made the rivets if she had asked. She placed him back in line with the others, casting her blurry vision along the line of them until she could see just one Cabal face when she stood at the end of the line. In this way she had decimated them.  


* * *

Eriana flew. Where she had once reached to sunlight for power, now it was the smoky green emanations of the Hive that swirled around her. The power wasn’t enough, she knew; she could not take a flagship apart on her own. She did not have Crota’s form, layered in chitin and sealed against the cold of the Moon. Some of her body panels had been stripped away, discarded when they became rusted or gummed up by the pit or just now flapping free in the heat of ascent. She was a war machine who had survived long enough to become corroded. All that was important now was the statement, though, her declaration of intent against this whole searing fleet that had disturbed the edges of her territory.  
  
If there had been no greater power than Oryx in the system, there would be no greater power than Eriana either.  
  
Something dropped from her cloak as she flew. She turned to see a silver glint as the flanges of Sai Mota’s Ghost fell, loosed from the tangle Eriana had not even noticed.  
  
She stormed toward the fleet. It looked like another asteroid belt drawing tight around the Earth, but she had a long time to fly before she made it to the flagship. _If_ she made it. Her body felt cold, a physical sensation like none she had ever felt before that seemed to bypass diagnostics and go straight to her surface. Had she eaten enough Hive-stuff to become embodied like them? Or was it just so very cold?  
  
The atmosphere, maybe, was buffeting her too much, cutting her down to a skeletal frame. The pieces of the Ghost were not the only metal pieces that fell from her.  
  
She had been more clever than this once, Eriana thought slowly. She once would not have had this animal urge to fight, this hunger, this lethargy.  
  
But even as she thought of it she was reminded of the pull of the swordlogic, the inexorable equation that said that to win was to be self-defined.  
  
She would live, or she would die dashed against the flagship, and those choices were her whole world.  


* * *

The sides of the jumpship glowed white-hot as Amanda Holliday headed toward the atmosphere. The Guardian she had picked up was glancing from one window to the next, trying to take in the sight of the Cabal fleet pouring onto Earth. _Not something you see every day,_ Amanda kept thinking. Maybe if she kept calm inside her own head, the rest would turn out okay.  
  
“Someone near the EDZ is hailing all Guardians,” the Ghost said suddenly.  
  
“Yeah?” Amanda drummed her fingers on the sticks, but they were on orbital ascent now and wouldn’t have to start making any fancy moves for a few seconds. “Put ‘em through!”  
  
“We can’t find Ikora.” Static cut the man’s voice up into harsh bursts. “What’s wrong with the Light?”  
  
“Saw the Vanguard not long ago,” Amanda said. “Seemed a bit busy. They’ll keep in touch as soon as they can!”  
  
The ship broke atmosphere and Amanda started to weave back and forth, finding the spaces that felt like a strong current between flashes of Cabal and Guardian ships.  
  
By the time they escaped the thick of it and Amanda was exultant, so awake and in synch with herself and victorious for having lived, she glanced at the terminator line as they swung around the Moon.  
  
Something was rising from the surface like a golden comet.  
  
The Guardian, hushed, said “That’s Mare Imbrium.”

* * *

Toland found Eriana when he crawled from the deep later, out of loneliness and the threat of starvation. The Exo body had burnt somewhere in the atmosphere, leaving curled remnants of silver metal and flakes of yellow paint. The mare was almost silent, Hive forces in shock at the strangeness now present in the solar system. Too many wars had come in too quick succession. Now rumor said a new planet was coming too, a visitor from the cold distance.  
  
Toland floated to Eriana’s side. She would need a eulogy, and for that he needed to know more about what killed her. But how to get to Earth now, when the Hive were not only no longer the power in the system, but almost refugees?  
  
He had every colony on the Moon to pore over now, though.  

* * *

 

The Deathsinger flew. Eris Morn had stolen one ship to leave the moon, and without any guilt over stealing from the Guardians she had intended to join, taking one from the Cabal was easier. She hissed and screamed and took a gun from the Cabal, blasting in with the intent not to destroy the ship. It would be difficult to fly, but she did not plan to need a way to get out.  
  
In the stormy sky her vision was clearer, the blackness suiting her three eyes. The rage was also clarified when she saw the fuzzy edge of the atmosphere again. In just hours she had seen it twice, after being away for so many years. Of course it would be different this time, of course she would look for individual storms and flares of light as if she could recognize them. Maybe if she succeeded at this she would see them again.  
  
As the hull of the red flagship rose up in front of her she bared her teeth. Ichor seeped against her gums and in her fury she spat it at the console.  
  
She brought the ship down at about the same time as she sensed the Guardian. She pointed the sticks at the hull indiscriminately, and then there was that spark that reminded her that she might have been human once. She had _known people_ like this Guardian, bright people -  
  
The hull was rising up too fast. Eris dragged the stick over and landed between a radial fin and an airlock. The side of her ship rocked, perched on the edge of a metal facet. She cycled her own airlock as fast as she cold, and ripped through the next one with blasts from clawed hands.  
  
The cold of the high altitude around the Traveler made her vision blur even further. Anger in her footfalls, anger in her hands, anger in the bile filling her mouth, but she knew that anger would not bear her up against the cold of the hall now. Eris dashed into the Cabal ship, wanting to curl up in a warm corner and sleep. She drove herself forward into the hall, the wind whipping at her rags and her chitin.  
  
She could feel the Guardians paralleling her. Instead of Light, she sensed them as if she could hear an animal in a warren underground; there were people moving, disturbing the dirt of the world, and she was deep enough into the magic of the Hive that she knew where exactly they were. Strange, that she had not felt this before. Power passed through her in such excess that she felt she could shake it from her hands.    
  
It was still limited, though. She kept floating forward, realizing in a belated, dreamlike way that she had not been breathing correctly or feeling the break in her leg for - for how long? When she tried to breathe her lungs felt weak and cold, her breath not constricted in her throat but behind her ribs.  
  
Shields snapped around her, cutting off the breach. Soldiers in here would have to run, or to live off their own life support. She flew, surrounded by green glow and yellow sparks, and slipped through a gap of a closing door.  
  
The hallway on the other side was filled with marching feet. Cabal shifted from one console to another, perhaps monitoring or controlling the automated guns that grew out of of the sides of the ship.  
  
At first, they ignored her. Eris pressed her back against the wall and bent with one hand on her knee, the other bracing her, finally catching deep enough breaths that she could forget about the empty feeling in her chest. The impression of power was still there too, though, and she knew now that the team of Guardians had left their pilot and were moving toward … she did not know where. Perhaps this ship was their greatest goal, or perhaps it was a trap left for them. The Cabal were not puissant enough to matter to her. They did not wield any kind of magic at all, and their steel was like nothing to her.  
  
One of the Cabal technicians noticed her.  
  
The Cabal pulled a sidearm from where it had been magnetized across her chest. Her shot took Eris in the hip, just above her already ruined leg.  
  
Eris whipped her hands out, and energy blasted across the Cabal’s face. The death was quick; this woman had not been trained for combat and did not wear armor as heavy as even the weakest warrior who had ever been sent to Mars. From it Eris felt a surge of power, a trickle of recognition. She had felt this sort of spark from Eriana, once. It was the feeling of the tithe. Energy came more clearly now, though, not simply passed through her to Eriana but taken in. The pain in her leg disappeared.  
  
She was the peak of the sword-logic now, Eris realized quickly. Part of her mind lagged behind, injecting disbelief into her thoughts and twisting her mouth, but the power did not allow itself to be ignored.  
  
The power flowing to Eris meant that Eriana was dead. Of that Eris was certain, and grieving, and terrified, and there was no room in that terror for exultation. There would be no song for this. For a moment, Eris felt more human than she had in years.  
  
Humanity was lonely.  
  
Eris was too, now, but she had also been revitalized. The rest of these Cabal did not concern her, not when the mastermind behind the attack was somewhere else in this ship. She had not tortured their comrade to inconvenience the Cabal army by forcing it to, at its own pace, release some technicians. The Guardians were still moving.  
  
Eris followed them.  
  
With her ascension came a new awareness of the forces of the Hive. There were so few of them now, she realized. Whispers in the deathsong were disapproving commentary from the dreaming dormant worm gods she had never met, but whose remains in the Dreadnaught still reached out toward her. Closer to her than the Earth was the Moon, with its few troops and its breathless lieutenant, her other self, Toland the Shattered Reforged and now broken again with awe. Their remaking had been too similar for him not to feel some tug toward the pinnacle.  
  
Eris glided through corridors. More than she expected were empty, perhaps already cleared by the Guardian. Toland’s awareness of her was dulled by distance, dulled by his own lack of imagination or lack of loyalty - he had not wanted to return to the Guardians. She could imagine that conversation, ideas shifting between them without words:  
  
_So, a new contender ascends to the vaulted places. To what do you aspire now, my queen?_ Toland asked.  
  
_Only this. To kill this creature that threatens the Tower, so that I can start again at the place I intended to run to in the beginning._  
  
Would he tell her that she lacked ambition? Would it be possible to define this as lack of ambition, when she had by her nature changed the definition of ambition for the Hive? _Queen._  
  
Were more of the Hive attacking the Cabal now, turning more fierce even as their fight against the Guardians continued?  
  
The need to answer the question became the need to test herself against those forces, and tugged her onward.  
  
Eventually, the Guardian’s trajectory crossed over hers. By the time she neared the most heavily-defended part of the ship, the fireteam had cleared most of the Cabal out of the corridors, leaving them in heavy hillocks that Eris needed to duck around in case there were Psions or beasts hiding behind the still-tall corpses. The Guardian’s destination was a reinforced door now opened, burned in places from the early salvos of the fight.  
  
The dark room filled with muzzle flashes and sparks. Eris sang.  
  
She felt Ghaul immediately. Alongside the bright and Blinking Guardians the Cabal dominus was a tower of darkness, fleet-strong, secular. When she sang to him the song hooked into the temporal fact of him and began to hurry on his storied death.  
  
The Guardians fought, were beaten back. Eris could not see the details of their fight until Ghaul drove them out onto an open skywatch beside the dark hallway. He revealed the armored form of himself. The team had become separated, one Hunter waiting against the wall as if in shock, frozen in an attempt at strategy.  
  
Eris glided out.  
  
Her shrieks were having an effect. The Guardians had taken Ghaul’s shield, and Eris blasted his armor with gouts of power that shoved and burned and drained the reserves of the tithe given to her. Green sparks burst against Ghaul’s arms and staggered his feet.  
  
It took just seconds for the Guardians to notice that Eris was, even if she appeared as horrific as Ghaul, fighting their same foe with useful abandon. A Titan recovered first, shot a rocket that staggered the Guardian and tore a chunk out of Ghaul’s armor. When the piece fell, smoking at the edges, it hit like a house falling down.  
  
Eris rose up in front of Ghaul. Red-rimmed eyes in an already bleeding face showed her the same masked animosity they had shown the Guardians, no less and no more.  
  
_In this, I am one of them. The Cabal have made me into this._  
  
Words in echo from the Moon, distorted on the way into sibilant messages from Eris’ attendant Deathsinger: _It’s not all bad. In losing humanity, did you not gain insight?_  
  
Eris threw a barrage of sound and energy, plasma drawn from sparks caught on the nature of Ghaul’s life, and hit Ghaul under the chin with it. The burst exploded again in a rain of green fire, feeding on the damage it was doing even as it did more. Eris felt the Guardians flinch, her power appearing to them as an unLight fecund and creeping. In Eris’ hands the combined victories and rages of the Hive species burned Ghaul’s leathery face. Flames popped armor plates out from their connectors, raising welts in the metal. One of the winglike boosters on Ghaul’s back cracked, the sound snapping out like thunder while the uneven line spilled black smoke.  
  
Eris rose herself up on the winds of the aftershocks.    
  
Under the sound of fading explosions came the whine of a house-sized jumpship. The pilot had pulled around to the side of the skywatch. Guardians resumed their attack on Ghaul, driving him back. Eris gathered green glow and stirred it together. She was beyond Deathsinger magic now, beyond the slice and wave of the twinned raveling and unraveling, but there was some of that in her attack too. She pointed and the blast followed the line out from her hand black with ichor, painting it in patches of green like sun through trees.  
  
The screaming blast hit Ghaul’s chin, tore the mask off, and burrowed.  
  
In the long shadows and glare of his burning Eris limped toward the ship Amanda had pulled up to the skywatch. The Guardians leveled guns at her, that rocket launcher that she had seen kick so hard now an open mouth in front of her eyes.  The pilot shouted, though, looking at Eris with recognition - maybe she saw tatters of Hunter garb, maybe she saw the human face from the nose down, streaked with gore. The Guardians kept their guns up, but the pilot kept the door open.  
  
When Eris stepped into the ship her leg began to ache.

* * *

The European Dead Zone no longer dead, and Eris wasn’t either, as much as the distinction sometimes became distractingly complicated. She sat on the porch of a wooden house and thought about the immensity of her power and responsibility. She could feel the Hive armies waiting, growing, fearing, but she could not leverage them yet. There was much to learn before she would even want to, before she could determine whether that use would not counteract entirely her fragile truce with what remained of the Guardians. Eris Morn hummed to herself and to her twice-Shattered Deathsinger on the Moon and to the Guardian who journeyed out into the solar system, to find the wandering planets.  
  
Such narrowly-sliced distinctions of death: she had died and been reborn as a Guardian and then wrapped death around herself and weaved it, and now - well, she was still breathing. She mourned the Eriana who had been and the Eriana who had ended. Sometimes her breaths came in unexpected thick sobs, gone as quickly as they arrived. People still vouched for her. She had not yet had the conversation with Amanda Holliday, the one that would go _I am a Hive Queen in your walled refuge._  
  
She looked up at the Guardians around her. There would be time for that.

**Author's Note:**

> [End credits.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMYw8eamSHU)


End file.
